Acer Predator Helios 300 review – Best affordable gaming laptop

Most laptop companies hype their product way more than it can function, however, Acer producing company gives a lot of value to their product with highly defined and operating systems with lots of god functions. The Acer Predator Helios 300 gives its clients a more sensitive and powerful, VR-ready NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU for a far more lesser price as compared to other products with the same quality and runs the same number of circles at the GTX 1050 Ti cards which other laptops at the same range operates. The most important factor of this system is the fact that it is flexible, that is it can be upgraded to high versions.

Design and build

The design of this product is almost the same as that of other Acer products; its black in color and the metal lid has two red stripes around the Predator logo. You will see a small plastic bumper on the top of the lid that looks way cheaper than the aluminum around it though.

Below the lid, there is 15.6-inch, 1080p display, surrounded by a bezel t which has the Predator logo on the bottom and the Acer logo on the top-left corner. The predator Helios 300 weighs 5.5 pounds and 15.4 x 10.5 x 1.5 inches, however, it larger than other gaming laptops. It is larger than systems such as Asus ROG STRIX GL553VD and the Lenovo Legion Y526.but lighter than the 17-inch MSI GP72VR 7RFX.

The Predator Helios 300 is made up of many ports. Located at the left -hand side are an Ethernet jack, a USB Type-C port, HDMI output, a USB 3.0e port, and an SD card slot. And on the right-hand side headphone jack and a pair of USB 2.0 ports.

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Display

The Predator’s display houses about 81 percent of the SRGB color gamut. Unfortunately, the colors are not too accurate. The screen average brightness is 222 nits on the light meter, which is dimmer than the average (274 nits), the STRIX(269 nits) and the Leopard Pro (245 nits), but brighter than the Legion (220 nits).

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Keyboard and touchpad

The laptop has a very comfortable keyboard. However, the keyboard is not that sensitive. The control keys have 1.6 millimeters of vertical travel. To operate the keyboard one needs about 79 grams of pressure, making it feel heavy.

The shift key and the top arrow key are very close to one another – closer than any other two keys on the keyboard. The Predator’s keyboard is unique and backlit only in red; it does not have RGB lighting, which some might find a bad thing and some a good thing. This really comes to what some might personally prefer.

The touchpad is large, accurate and responsive to Windows 10 gestures; you will definitely have no problem zooming or swiping. Though you should never try to use a touchpad for gaming.

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Audio

Acer’s speakers are nice and loud and are convenient for users. The preinstalled Dolby Audio app offers a series of profiles, Music, Movie and Game modes. It is slightly louder when using the Movie mode, but the Game mode focused more on the background sound.

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Gaming, graphics, and VR

The Predator’s NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 GPU with 6GB of VRAM shows its quality of operation in our performance assessment.

The Predator is able to run an upgraded version of games optimally, for example, when the Tomb Raider benchmark increased to (1080p, very high settings), the Predator ran the game at 67 fps, which is more than the mainstream notebook average (36 fps) and others.

When assessing The Predator on a STREAMER performance test, it achieved a score of 7.1 which is more than the average of 5.6.

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Performance

The Predator is made with a 2.8 GHz Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU, with a 16GB of RAM and a 256GB solid-state drive, which is suitable for many operations on the system at the same time. Meaning you won’t be seeing much freezing with this bad boy.

You might need an upgrade on the 256 GB SSD since most modern games take a lot of space, so you might notice that your running out of space soon to install any new games.

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Battery life

This laptop lasts longer than we expected and it is satisfying for multitasking within that period of time. It can operate for as long as 6 hours and 48 minutes on battery assessment, which gives the user enough time to work and play games.

Other laptop systems such as the MSI Leopard Pro, for instance, endured for only 2:32 and the ASUS STRIX only a bit longer 3:41.

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Heat

The Predator operates for a long time at minimal load without getting hot. It cools and maintains a steady temperature which is essential for the operation of its system. Comparatively, it maintains and cools more than its competitors at the same rate. However, it also hits up when a bulk load of operations is going on at the same time on the system such as playing a game and listening to music from Spotify or other services. The heat does leak on the keyboard while the touchpad stays relatively cool so try to keep this in mind.

User reviews

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Conclusion

The Acer Predator Helios 300 is a powerful, VR-ready gaming system that offers much satisfaction to the users at a far lower price than that of its rivals. The Acer Predators display is not as high quality as most laptops but still satisfactory. It does, however, have a high-quality battery that increases its lifetime and gives you that extra power to play and enjoy your PC longer without needing to put it behind a cord.

There is no doubt, that there are laptops that offer a far better resolution than Acer but they are in most cases more expensive and have a shorter battery life than the Acer Predator Helios 300. For these reasons we highly recommend this product to anyone looking for a budget gaming laptop for themselves.

8.6Expert Score

The GTX 1060 offers a good amount of power for this laptop, making sure you can run most games on ultra settings with a smooth 60 fps or high when using a bit lower settings. The Acer Helios 300 tends to heat up a lot, so you shouldn't keep it on your lap when playing and on the table, you should ensure you got enough room for it to breath.